Saturday, November 28, 2009

International Dagger 2010

It's early days to be thinking of the short list for the International Dagger but I've had a couple of requests to list the "eligible" titles from the Euro Crime database.

The CWA website has not yet been updated for 2010 but based on last year, the criteria for this category will be that:

Eligible books must be crime novels by the broadest definition including thrillers, suspense novels and spy fiction as long as the book was not originally written in English and has been translated into English for UK publication between June 1 2009 and May 31 2010.

So based on my database, here are the fifty-ninesixty sixty-one titles I believe to be eligible, based on amazon.co.uk publication dates and a loose interpretation of the definition of "crime fiction". I have included the non European books that I know about, though there may be omissions of course. (Links are to Euro Crime reviews). As it's quite early it's possible more titles will be published before the end of May that I don't yet know about:

What a fantastic list, thank you Karen! I must get reading, I can see. I think of myself as a keen reader of translated European crime fiction but I have read only nine of these titles! (I have read other books by some more of the authors).Thanks, Karen, I'm looking forward to perusing the titles on this list - first I'll be looking for that Lief Davidsen and the Camilla Lackberg.

This is splendid, Dame Karen, but I must just point out that Perez-Reverte's Pirates of the Levant is one of his 'Captain Alatriste' adventure novels, not crime fiction at all. I wrote a while back on Kerrie's blog that some of his publishers have been confusing this issue by trying to cash in on the success of his wonderful crime novels -- Flanders Panel, Seville Communion, Dumas Club -- by making reference to them on the covers of his historical swashbucklers. They'll just annoy people, because by no stretch are the Alatriste books crime fiction.

Otherwise, I have read a grand total of four of these titles, so Maxine is way ahead of me. This is largely a function of my living in the catchment area of the worst public library system in the history of the universe and all parallel universes, as I keep on telling them.

Hi Philip, yes I've read the first Alatriste book which I quite liked. I suppose it's more an adventure series but I thought I'd leave it in anyway. Another anomaly is Tove Jansson's book which is probably as much like crime fiction as Karin Fossum's Broken was. Sorry that you have a poor library service. Mine is quite good but is slow to get books from the smaller presses and few copies when they do arrive.